Biography
When Kyle Wooten launches into “The Choking Blues,” the effect is less about quiet intervals than the audible sense of throttling, an outcome that follows naturally once powerful lips and throat muscles begin reshaping the fragile reeds inside a harmonica. Blending elaborate vocal maneuvers with lifelike animal impersonations, Wooten stands apart among harmonica players, equaled in sheer sonic daring only by Freeman Stowers and Garley Foster. He belongs to the circle of pioneering American harmonica masters featured on the Yazoo anthology Harmonica Masters: Classic Recordings From the 1920s and 1930s, a compilation that traces the instrument’s role across the country blues, backwoods country old-time music, jazz, and ragtime styles then taking shape. Strictly a product of the rural idiom, Wooten appears on a dedicated collection issued by County, the label renowned for old-time Appalachian music and bluegrass. “There’s something about them backwoods that breeds good harp players. These dudes sure can play!” one enthusiast declares on an online forum devoted to the instrument. The harmonica’s easy portability gives any performer a range of motion unavailable to bassists or drummers, allowing the instrument to move freely among genres; apart from the blues, where amplification secured it a central place, it functions as something of a stylistic free agent. Although classical figures such as Larry Adler produced the most technically elaborate harmonica passages ever captured, it is the old-time practitioners like Wooten and his peers who pushed the instrument toward its most extreme expressions, exploiting its capacity to mimic both natural and mechanical sounds—chickens, birds, dogs, rifles, howling gusts of wind, and trains among them. Wooten’s contribution to the County set is the snorting portrait “Red Pig.” Comparable feats of vivid depiction include Dr. Humphrey Bate’s “Take Your Foot Out of the Mud,” which leaves a listener almost tasting the mire, and Oliver Sims’s buoyant “Hop About Ladies.” Talent scouts sweeping through the Appalachians captured Wooten’s work during the first wave of commercial recording enthusiasm, yet almost nothing further is known about his personal history.